Hermeneutics & The Communion of Saints

I’ve very much enjoyed dipping into Stanley Fish’s provocative and engagingly written essays in Is There A Text In This Class?

Fish is asking whether author, text or reader determines meaning and concludes that all three are shaped by and shape authoritative interpretive communities.

This seems to me a valuable insight – especially if we think a bit more about our interpretive community.

If my interpretive community is just me, or me and my mates, or me and the academy (the bigger books on my shelves), it seems to me that we’re going to go badly wrong.

Our interpretive community must be the church. And not just 234^th strict and peculiar ana-Baptist church continuing, but the church down the centuries and across the world, the Communion of Saints.

Which of course includes those saints who will come after us, as we trust the church will mature and grow in her understanding. Which gives our readings an element of provisionality. And suggests an eschatological horizon: only in the New Creation together with all God’s people will our reading be perfected.

And our community, of course, includes the human authors of the Bible and their original intended audience.

But ultimately our reading goes beyond Fish soup, for our fellowship is also with the Father, Son and Spirit: the divine originator, centre and judge of the church, the ultimate author of the Bible and our interpretive community, in whom we live and move and have our being.

Barth on Scripture smelling Fishy

I’ve been reading Stanley Fish, Is There A Text In This Class? and it strikes me that he shares with Barth a desire to hold on to the objectivity of the text (at least at times) but an emphasis on the moment of reception of the text by readers as the really meaningful moment, almost the time when the text “becomes” a Text. Barth could say something like that about the written Word of God.